Many Ahabs Hunting the Whale

For the second time in just a few weeks I was woken just before dawn by a dream.

The first time I woke, I remember a voice telling me that our country needed to read again Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I, at least, needed to reread it. I heard that the rapacious business interests and those in the government in league with them were behaving like contemporary Ahabs, so intent on short-term profit that they were hunting a great and mythical beast to death. The whale, according to my dream, was the earth itself. And while current forces in our country might hope to profit from the hunt of this great whale, they were bent on a path that would destroy us all.

This morning I dreamed of a whale again. But it was a more indirect connection to Moby Dick. I dreamt I held a glass of white wine in one hand as I looked up into the smiling face of a young man, maybe thirty-five or so. He was very tall, wore khakis and a T-shirt, and smiled as he told me about his life. He said once he thought he would grow up to work on Wall St., squirrel his profits away in portfolios that would yield him a modest but steady profit, and then retire to live on the income. “But then, I went to the bay,” he said. “And I heard a sound like a sudden and loud squirting of bubbles and water. Then there was nothing. And then in some minutes I heard the sound again. I looked at the little bay, surrounded by trees, and I saw that with each squelching sound the water in the bay squirted out into the ocean, leaving the bay’s water level low, only to be followed by minutes when the ocean water flowed back into the bay and restored its water level. I had no idea what it was at first. But later I learned it was a huge whale, mostly submerged in the bay not far from shore.”

The young man’s eyes had been trained on the distance as he remembered, but then he turned and looked me right in the eye. “Did you know,” he said, “that this pulse of air and water coming off a dying whale will continue for a week after its death? What I was witnessing was a dying whale. I just didn’t know it at the time. And when I saw and heard those things, my life changed. I found a way to help whales from dying.”

After he said this, I woke from the dream. My heart was pounding in my chest and I lay in bed trying to remember everything I’d just experienced.

And then I began to hear the thunder and see the lightning flashes outside my window. And then, between the thunder’s rumbling, I heard the sound of a huge wind. But it was not like any storm gust I’d heard before. The sound of the wind was sustained through many thunder claps. And it had a peculiar pulse to it. Almost a whirring, like air that was being stirred around and around in the air above our house. It sounded like a giant motor. And it was getting louder, like a locomotive approaching our house.

Suddenly, I was very awake. I threw off my covers and leapt out of bed, strode to a north bedroom to make sure I could hear this wind from the other side of the house, and when I could I shook my husband and son awake so we could take shelter in our basement.

The storm has moved on now. A check of laptop computers has shown that a huge, red storm cell tracked by NOAA had just moved over our town. Behind it is NOAA’s blue field that signals only clouds and light rain are in the skies right now, but what I and my husband heard was the sound of a storm passing over our house.

It’s now half an hour later and I’m still awake typing this. I’ll puzzle over it all once morning light is in the sky. For now, my son and I will try to get back to sleep. My husband is already blissfully resting in the bed upstairs.